The Album, a Commodity in Disfavor – New York Times Last year, digital singles outsold plastic CD’s for the first time. So far this year, sales of digital songs have risen 54 percent, to roughly 189 million units, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Digital album sales are rising at a slightly faster pace, but buyers of digital music are purchasing singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1.

On the one hand this is to be expected. The wheat/chaff ratio of tracks on pop music CDs is one of the chief reasons for the decline in CD sales and the rise of piracy according to polls done over the last 10 years. Also, it is a natural consequence of radio promotion which promotes the heck out of one song of an album, and then the next song, and so on. So ‘natch, you give people the option to buy just the songs they like or know and what do they do?

On the other hand, this really is more than that. The album has been the primary format of music delivery for a long time. For an artist, you spend x number of years working on an album, you put it out, you promote it, you tour on it, and then repeat. For a label, your promotions people are focused on the current release, working the radio stations, and magazines, etc… For press, you focus so many column inches to music reviews, you can’t focus 1/10 of the space for a song as you would a record, so you can review less. The only part of the business that would probably be ok with this is radio, which has always been singles oriented.

Addressing this shift in the business will be game changing for the labels, I think. The major acts will do fine with their CDs for a little while, but this is really the chance for one to jump out ahead with some well timed and well played moves.

Since 2005, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department’s civil-rights division when it was rolling back longstanding voting-rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.

Another newly installed U.S. attorney, Tim Griffin in Little Rock, Ark., was accused of participating in efforts to suppress Democratic votes in Florida during the 2004 presidential election while he was a research director for the Republican National Committee. He has denied wrongdoing.

Read the original article in full. This is some serious evil the Bush administration has been trying to get over on the American people.

Tech Crunch – Good News! CD Music Sales Down 20% from 2006 As the marginal price of recorded music continues to fall towards zero, its natural price, bands will need to make money elsewhere. Live concerts will become more and more popular, and will be the largest source of revenue for many artists. Recorded music will be used to promote those live events. Popular artists will still make a very, very good living. Others will have to decide if love of their art is enough to keep going.

I debating posting this on DMdN, but the above statement stopped me. The reason being… “duh.”

I would say that 99.9% of artists making money these days are making the majority of it from live performance. Not only is it true now, IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN TRUE. Even indie artists who own their own masters and do their own distribution and blah blah blah make most of their money from playing live. The margin on selling music is HORRIBLE. Seriously. Record a record in your bedroom. Put it on iTunes. Ignore the money spent on buying the equipment and your time, the cost of production is zero, right? Well, per song sale, you’ll make on the order of $.70. Which is not too shabby for something that cost nothing to produce, right? Now, play one night in a crappy bar for a $250 gaurentee. You’d need to sell 358 songs on iTunes to make as much money as you’d make in one bar on one night, and if you are only getting a $250 gaurentee, you probably aren’t going to be selling too many songs on iTunes anyway, right?

Now I just ignored a lot of the real costs like: promotion, recording equipment, gas, beer, etc… That makes the math easier, but the fact of the matter is that most artists who are full time musicians are on small labels and don’t really sell too many CDs. For each CD they do sell, the band probably only sees a couple bucks (starting a record label as an investment? don’t be stupid). A short tour where the van doesn’t break down and the band doesn’t have to bail someone out of jail can net the band double whatever their CD sales are for a record. So why would a band record music at all? To promote their live shows, of course! Radio stations need something to play when your band is in town. People who dig you need a way to share your music with their friends. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll be the next Dave Matthews or Nine Inch Nails or something and you’ll actually see a royalty check with a comma in it. Just don’t base your musical career on that one…

Of course, once you become as big as U2 or whatever, you’ll still make the majority of your income from live shows and t-shirts and what not. Why? Well, because now you’ll be playing stadiums where people pay $50 for some crappy seat behind a pole. Look at how much money is made on the year’s big music tours. Now, all that cash goes to the artist unless they made an incredibly stupid deal. Sure, they have a lot of costs to cover, but most of that is profit, baby. These days, they can sell sponsorship of their tour with the result being more profit.

In other words, Mike Arrington, stick to whatcha know when you are going to pundit-ize.

I am a city planning geek. When I was first working on virtual worlds stuff in the mid-90s, I started reading it for work and I got hooked: Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Robert Venturi, Lewis Mumford and all their kin. James Howard Kunstler is a well-known author as well, but I’d bought this book a decade ago and didn’t get around to reading it until now.

This book has some good information in it: how America became car obsessed and how poor planning lead to the decline of the small town and the rise of suburban sprawl. Some of this was quite interesting, but this kind of information is covered in every book on the topic.

Once the background is established, however, all the author does is complain about it. The book left me feeling a little flat. There were no solid prescriptions for change, or even a reasonable set of tentative next steps. Rather, there was a liturgy of how ugly the American landscape has become and a wagging finger directed at city planners nationwide.

I think that this book wasn’t meant for me. I already curse suburban sprawl, car culture, strip malls and house facades whose most prominent feature is the garage door. I think that this book was meant for the indifferent Americans, who mostly haven’t thought that much about it. This would be a great book if you were looking for a primer on some of these issues. The writing style is very accessible and the book is an easy read (which is more than can be said for many urban planning books).

It does feel a bit dated at times, but what is striking (especially for a resident of one of the country’s fastest growing cities) is how so little has changed since the author wrote it. The strip malls and seas of parking lots continue to be the most dominant feature around the ever increasing subdivisions of identical homes with two car garages facing the street and no sidewalks. If you are a resident of a town being destroyed like this, a case of these books would be a great gift for your mayor and city council.

Overall, it is a worthy read. If you are interested in the subject already, you won’t learn much new, but you won’t feel like your time was wasted. If you haven’t already read much in the area, you’ll learn a lot and you’ll find the writing makes the subject easy to approach.

When you see the “Optimizing System Performance” phase of a software update, Mac OS X is really updating prebinding. Updating prebinding has a very, very nasty bug in it (look at _dyld_update_prebinding). If multiple processes are updating prebinding at the same time, then it is possible for a system file to be completely zero’d out. Basically, all data in the file is deleted and it is replaced with nothing. This bug is usually triggered when updating Mac OS X and every update to Mac OS X has the potential to render your system unbootable depending on if the “right” file is deleted or not. It’s triggered during the “Optimizing System Performance” phase of installing an update. This phase is actually just running update_prebinding. If you launch an application that links to libraries that are not yet prebound, there is a chance one of those files will be zero’d out as dyld automatically redoes the prebinding on that file.

Life is too short for crummy food, N likes to say. It sometimes makes it difficult to try a new restaurant. Luckily, someone else made the reservations, because we might not have tried it otherwise. Located in a bit of a grim place it manages to convey a bit of high-end feel, although the furniture is a bit too space-age-bachelor-pad. The food and service were excellent with the prices in-line with the quality.

The administration is blaming the blatantly political firings of federal prosecutors on Harriet Myers, who resigned in February. I mean this is just so dumb. First, you recommend her for Supreme Court justice and spend countless pages of print talking about how close she and the president are. Then, you stab her in the back and claim she’d gone upriver and was doing evil things without the president’s knowledge. Yet again, the hubris of the White House is shown in stark relief. They seem to be under the impression that the American people have the attention span and memory of a gnat.